Sochi 2014: the streaming Olympics

Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS – 14th of February, 2014

During the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Summer Games Olympics streaming accounted for 34 percent of all Internet traffic. No wonder the Dutch national broadcaster NOS/NPO came well prepared for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

During the previous Olympics in London over 5 million online viewers visited the NOS Olympic website. For the 2014 Olympic Games NOS/NPO once again chose the Unified Streaming Platform (USP) as their streaming software foundation.

Amsterdam-based USP has proven itself time and time again as a stable and scalable streaming platform for large events like the European Soccer Championships, the Tour de France and the Olympic games.

For the Sochi Olympics NOS/NPO is thinking big. Dutch online viewers are serviced by eight Olympic-livestreams, which use USP's adaptive bitrate streaming-technology. The video dynamically adapts to network conditions and video rendering performance. This ensures users of pc's, smartphones or tablets the best possible viewing experience. That means without buffering or stuttering (when meeting the minimum bitrate/CPU requirements).

After one week of Olympics, it seems that NOS/NPO efforts are paying off. Just as the efforts of the Dutch olympic team: the Netherlands has claimed almost every men's speedskating medal handed out in Sochi, following a 1-2-3 finish in the 5,000 meters and another 1-2-3 in the 500 meters. The 1,000 meters resulted in two more Dutch wins (gold and bronze).

In the wake of this massive Dutch Olympic succes come new streaming records. For example: the final for the 500 meters speedskating, drew aproximately 148.000 Dutch online viewers. A couple of days later more than 160.000 online viewers flocked to the NOS' Olympic website. By comparison; speedskating at the 2010 winter Olympics atttracted about 80.000 Dutch online viewers.

'Watching the Dutch speed skaters perform at the Winter Olympics it is understandable why so many people are watching online', says Unified Streaming CEO Dirk Griffioen, 'As we were convinced that Sotchi 2014 would not cause any scalability issues, NOS/NPO has only added extra bandwidth to cope with peaks in demand. It is exciting to see that the platform again scaled and performed so well, offering the best online Winter Olympic experience ever.'

About Unified Streaming
Unified Streaming is a leading provider of cross-platform video-streaming technologies. Dedicated to helping companies create and execute smart video-streaming technologies, Unified Streaming products are in operation around the world, with customers ranging from broadcast networks and online content distributors to small companies and webcasters. Unified Streaming solutions fit into existing frameworks (Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, Nginx), thus, allowing for greater return on existing investment. Unified Streaming (USP) provides streaming from one encode simultaneously to multiple players and devices. In combination with various DRM technologies, this enables Unified Streaming customers to significantly reduce delivery cost and boost time to market, in order to address a broader audience.